Harvest Georgina Harding (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📖

tall behind her, just so much above her head. The dog had run into the flower beds, rustling between the stalks where there must have been some other creature out there besides themselves, or the scent of one at least. The house stood plain against the night sky, the Georgian façade on this side like that of a doll’s house, the window at the end of the passage above the stairs lit bright and a glimmer filtering from the boys’ room. They were there in their beds, exhaling their boys’ breath as they slept. She would look in on them later, tuck them up and breathe in for herself the heavy smell of their sleep. But for now she was cold outside, looking in. As if she might freeze into a pillar before the hedge. She must find herself, pull herself back in, go inside, call the dog in, go back into that light and out of the frost.

Enter the doll’s house, lock the door and bolt it, take off her coat, put fingers through her hair where the hat had pressed it down. The radio was still talking. Switch it off. Turn out the lights. Go upstairs. Tuck in the boys. Hover some moments at their door with the light from the passage behind her. In her bedroom, again, a radio. The Home Service, which talked until midnight and then played the National Anthem and closed down. Reach out into the crackle of emptiness and switch that off too.

Nothing then to mark the passage of the night. Broken sleep tailing away into precarious day. Coming downstairs, putting the kettle on, stoking the Aga. (The stoking had been Charlie’s chore; really she must modernise now that she was on her own.) Waking the boys. Daylight.

The rush of getting them up and off to school.

Two coats.

Two satchels to be found and checked.

Jonny’s turn in the front; Richard in the back.

The day grey. Some of these days were never fully light.

She could quiet their squabbling by having them practise their times tables. Seven sevens are forty-nine. Seven eights are fifty-six.

Behind her, Richard’s voice boomed out. She could let him lead the chant now, sure before his younger brother who became hesitant as the numbers got higher. Nine nines are eighty-one.

Avoirdupois now; weights, pounds and ounces. Even Richard having trouble here. Sixteen ounces, one pound.

She must drive with care on these narrow lanes, reversing to let the milk lorry pass. Measures. One thousand seven hundred and sixty yards, one mile.

A brief silence then, only the sound of the car, the low brick building of the school coming into view, other cars and children ahead of them. She would keep the engine running as they got out and went in the gate, yet holding still a minute longer than was necessary. Until there was no one else to be seen, the doors on the school shut, the yard empty but for the coloured lines painted across it, the other mothers gone. There was only herself, a woman in a stationary car, exhaust clouding in the cold air.

She took the journey home slowly, seeing the frost disperse from the grass and the plough. She noticed the catkins in the hedges which had just begun to loosen and show yellow. It was February. Almost three months gone, the worst of the winter. At a bend in the road she came upon a deer. She was going so slowly there that it was easy to stop. A roe deer, caught in fright, in the centre of the road. She saw the stilled poise of its body, the alertness of its ears, the black depth of its eyes. And what was she? A woman in a car, the engine turning over, exhaust. Was it woman that the deer saw or only car, for all that she felt its look within her? Then it turned its solemn head and slipped sudden and fast as spilled liquid through an opening in the hedge. She watched it run across the bare field in a series of fluid bounds, the white fleck of its rump rising and receding across wet brown soil. And a thought came to her. When Billy comes, she thought, I shall ask him to clear those dead stalks from the borders. Have him clear them now, before the spring. A second deer appeared from behind an oak and crossed the road and entered the field after the first. The brown of its body like that of the other was made distinguishable only by its movement against the plough.

While Billy cut she made a pyre of the stalks and burned them. They flared up and were gone in no time, so long they had been standing.

The borders lay open for the new growth. She could see the blades of bulbs already rising, even the thicker shoots of herbaceous plants emerging, brown shot with red and green, life within them, unravelling, pricking through the clumps.

When she walked the fields the mud weighed on her boots. If the mud clung to your boots the ground was too claggy to work, the men said.

Men spoke spare words. Words with weight and texture to them.

They made her aware of her own apparent lightness. But she was not light inside. She would be hard and heavy as they. Perhaps she always had been, though she had seemed light. Stronger than they knew. She put on lipstick in the hall mirror before she went out to face them. Put a scarf over her hair. Tied it beneath her chin. Spoke those words, firm as they did.

She must speak men’s words to her boys. Plain words, that was what boys needed.

Boys will be boys, people told her. She looked fragile, even if she wasn’t. The scarf, the lipstick, didn’t convince. People gave her their advice. You have to be tough with boys. She couldn’t argue. She had no brothers. She didn’t know boys before she gave birth to them.

They use sticks as